Alumni Impact Award

In Spring 2010, the Allen School (then the UW Computer Science & Engineering department) introduced its Alumni Achievement Award. Each subsequent year we have selected two outstanding alumni with exceptional records of achievement for recognition during our graduation celebration. Renamed the Alumni Impact Award in 2018, the award reaffirms to current and future Allen School graduates that each contributes to a long, successful line of alumni whose impact reaches far and wide.

2018

Yaw Anokwa

Yaw Anokwa has worked as an electrical engineer for Raytheon, a research scientist for Intel, an informatician for Partners in Health, and a software engineer for Google. He calls on these experiences in engineering, management, and academia to solve meaningful problems in developing communities. Since 2011, Yawhas worked at Nafundi, a software consulting company he co-founded to create technologies that improve the lives of underserved populations, with an emphasis on replacing paper-based workflows with mobile apps built on the Open Data Kit (ODK) platform.

Yaw co-created ODK, a set of free, customizable mobile and cloud-based tools for data collection, while earning his Ph.D. under the guidance of the late professor Gaetano Borriello and alumnus Tapan Parikh (Ph.D., '07), earning his Ph.D. in 2012. Organizations around the world have used ODK to collect and act on digital records for a variety of purposes, including public health, wildlife conservation, elections monitoring, and more. Thanks in part to Yaw's efforts to build a robust community within the ODK ecosystem, the ODK website has seen traffic from nearly every country, and millions of users are estimated to have used ODK or its derivatives worldwide. Yaw also contributed to OpenMRS, an open-source, electronic medical records system designed to improve patient care that is used in more than 50 countries.

Yaw was honored for his contributions with the UW College of Engineering's Diamond Award for Distinguished Service in 2015. He previously received the 2011 UW Graduate School Medal recognizing his efforts to combine academic expertise with social awareness to promote political, cultural, and social change. Before arriving at UW, Yaw simultaneously earned bachelor's degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from Butler University and Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, respectively.

Eileen Bjorkman

Eileen Bjorkman's career took off — literally and figuratively — following her graduation from UW. She earned her bachelor's degree in Computer Science in 1979. After a brief stint as a programmer, she joined the United States Air Force and earned a second degree in aeronautical engineering. She would become only the sixth woman to enroll in the Air Force's Test Pilot School, and subsequently notched over 700 hours of flight time in more than 25 different aircraft as a flight test engineer, instructor, and test squadron commander.

On the ground, Eileen combined her background in computing and aviation in a variety of staff and director positions involving modeling, simulation, analysis and joint testing. She was in charge of air-to-air combat modeling to evaluate how adjustments to a jet's aerodynamics and systems would affect the outcome of dogfights. She later commanded the 846th test squadron, overseeing the testing of high-speed missile delivery systems at the Holloman High-Speed Test Track, and the 746th, testing global positioning system (GPS) satellites. Upon her retirement from active duty, Eileen continued to serve her country in a civilian capacity. She is currently the Deputy Director of Programs, Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategic Plans, Programs and Requirements, overseeing the $605 billion Future Years Defense Plan for investing in technology, equipment, and personnel.

Along the way, Eileen earned two master's degrees — in aeronautical engineering and national resource strategy — and a Ph.D. in systems engineering from The George Washington University. In her spare time, she has clocked more than 2,000 hours of civilian flight time. An avid writer, Eileen has penned articles for Air & Space Magazine, Aviation History, the Daily Herald of Everett, and others. In 2017, she fulfilled a lifelong dream by publishing her first book, The Propeller under the Bed: A Personal History of Homebuilt Aircraft.

2017

A.J. Bernheim Brush

A.J. Bernheim Brush is a researcher in Human-Computer Interaction with a focus on Ubiquitous Computing and Computer Supported Collaboration. She is most well known for her research on technologies for families and her expertise conducting field studies of technology. Currently embedded in a Microsoft product group since January 2016, she spent the previous 11 years in Microsoft Research, where she co-led the Lab of Things project, a flexible, open-source platform for conducting experimental research on projects for the connected home, including home automation, energy management, and home healthcare. A.J.'s interest in cooperative work and field evaluation began during her time as a graduate student working with Allen School professor Alan Borning. Her Ph.D. dissertation, Annotating Digital Documents for Asynchronous Collaboration, focused on the role of co-author discussions anchored at a particular part of the document versus the document as a whole — pioneering work that required her to build systems as well as perform careful user studies of how those systems were employed in practice.

A.J. is a Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery and a current board member and past chair of CRA-W, an organization that works to increase the number of women in computing research. She received an Anita Borg Early Career Award in 2010 for significant contributions to her profession through her research and outreach to women. A.J.'s research has earned her a 10-year Impact Award, two Best Paper awards, and several Best Paper nominations. A.J. regularly serves on the program committees for high-profile conferences in the field, including UbiComp, Pervasive, CHI, and CSCW. Before her arrival at UW, A.J. graduated summa cum laude from Williams College in 1996 with a double major in Computer Science and Mathematics.

Hakim Weatherspoon

Hakim Weatherspoon is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. His research interests cover various aspects of fault-tolerance, reliability, security, and performance of internet-scale data systems such as cloud and distributed systems.

Hakim earned his bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering with a minor in Mathematics from the University of Washington, where he also played in four consecutive bowl games as a Husky football player. He went on to earn his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in the area of secure and fault-tolerant distributed wide-area storage systems. His Ph.D. dissertation, The Design and Evaluation of Distributed Wide-Area Online Archival Storage Systems, focused on systems that could store global data durably, verifiably, and with minimal maintenance. He and Berkeley colleagues built Antiquity, part of the OceanStore project, to create a simple storage service and interface for applications that used a secure log maintained on multiple servers to ensure data integrity — work that is credited with helping to lay the foundation for modern cloud storage systems.

Weatherspoon has earned a number of accolades for his many contributions, including an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship; National Science Foundation CAREER Award; and a Kavli Fellowship from the National Academy of Sciences. He serves as Vice President of the USENIX Board of Directors and is the Founder and General Chair for the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2017 SIGOPS/SIGMOD Symposium on Cloud Computing. Hakim has also been recognized for his work to promote diversity, earning Cornell's Zellman Warhaft Commitment to Diversity Award in 2014. Since 2011, he has organized the annual SoNIC Summer Research Workshop to help prepare between 15 and 25 students from underrepresented groups to pursue their Ph.D. in computer science.
Allen School Alumni Achievement Award

2016

Albert Greenberg

Albert Greenberg has worked on the front lines of grand scale networking and cloud computing for more than two decades, first at Bell Labs/AT&T and then at Microsoft. Albert earned his Ph.D. at UW CSE in 1983 working on the development of efficient algorithms for multiple access channels alongside professors Richard Ladner and Martin Tompa. Before his arrival at UW CSE, he earned his Bachelor’s in Mathematics from Dartmouth College.

At Bell Labs/AT&T in New Jersey, Albert rose to division manager for network measurement engineering and research, and then to executive director and AT&T Fellow. He returned to Seattle in 2007, joining Microsoft as a Principal Researcher. For the past six years he has served as Distinguished Engineer and Director of Development for Microsoft’s Azure Networking, the company’s global cloud computing infrastructure platform that spans millions of servers around the globe and helps make Seattle the leader in cloud computing. Albert’s responsibilities encompass physical and virtual datacenter networking design and management, overseeing teams in Redmond, Mountain View, Hyderabad, Dublin, and Beijing.

The UW CSE Alumni Achievement Award is the latest in a string of honors for Albert. Earlier this year he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering – the profession’s highest honor. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and has received the SIGCOMM Award for his lifetime contribution to the field of communications networks, the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award, and multiple “Test of Time” awards for his research.

Stefan Savage

As a leader in the Systems & Networking and Computer & Network Security groups at the University of California San Diego, professor Stefan Savage has tackled everything from computer worms and online scams, to distributed attacks, insidious global consumer fraud networks, and automobile systems hacking. He is being honored twice this month for his outstanding research in network security and efforts to fight cyber crime: tonight he receives the UW CSE Alumni Achievement Award, and tomorrow, he collects the 2015 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences.

Stefan earned his Ph.D. from UW CSE in 2002 working with professors Brian Bershad and Tom Anderson. His route to computer science academia was unorthodox. Having begun his studies as an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University in physics and cognitive science, he wound up earning a degree in applied history instead. He then spent two years working in a computer science lab at CMU before following Bershad to Seattle, earning admission to UW CSE’s doctoral program a year later.

Stefan received job offers from MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, CMU, Cornell, UCSD, and several others. He joined UCSD for the cultural fit and turned his attention to battling cyber drug crime and shutting down counterfeit software sales by tracking the flow of money. Stefan also co-founded the Center for Automotive Embedded Systems Security with UW CSE professor Yoshi Kohno to draw attention to the security vulnerabilities of modern automobile systems, and established the Center for Evidence Based Security Research in collaboration with the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley. He won the SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award in 2013, earning plaudits for his “uncanny ability to ask exactly the right question, propose exactly the right solution, and see that solution through to impact.

2015

Kevin Jeffay

Kevin Jeffay received his Ph.D. from UW CSE in 1989 where he worked with Alan Shaw in the area of real-time operating systems. He has spent his entire 26-year post-CSE career at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is now the Gillian T. Cell Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, and Chair of the Department of Computer Science -- the nation’s second-oldest computer science department.

Jeffay helped build the real-time systems program at UNC and, to attract students, established a multimedia group working on the then radical idea of processing audio-video in real time on a computer. Current high-profile research in the CS department includes a partnership with the physics department in developing the nanoManipulator, a virtual reality interface for scanned-probe microscopes. It can visualize an individual atom or clumps, and measures the mechanical forces required to bend a carbon nanotube. Another current project focuses on a free-space optical airborne communications network that would provide Internet service to homes across the U.S. through equipment installed on commercial aircraft.

An additional point of pride for those of us in UW CSE is that Kevin has always been deeply engaged with students. He’s won multiple awards for his teaching, and for many years he’s coached UNC’s team in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, including two trips to the World Finals.

Tim Paterson

Tim Paterson’s email address is DosMan @ PatersonTech.com. In the most succinct possible way, that tells the story. Tim was among the first UW undergraduate alums in Computer Science. He received his Bachelors degree in 1978.

After graduating he joined a tiny company called Seattle Computer Products (SCP) as its only engineer. Tim designed a single-board computer based on Intel’s new 8086 processor, which SCP started shipping in 1979. The computer needed an operating system, so Tim designed a system called 86-DOS, which SCP started shipping in 1980. Microsoft came knocking around that time; Microsoft first licensed and then purchased 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products. When the first IBM PC shipped in 1981, it was running that system -- re-branded by IBM as PC DOS. Tim worked on several additional releases of the system, both at Seattle Computer Products and at Microsoft.

His life has taken many interesting turns since that time -- from 8 years on the Visual Basic team to 5 years of competing in BattleBot tournaments.

2014

Jeff Dean

Jeff Dean received his PhD from UW CSE in 1996 where he worked with Craig Chambers on whole-program optimization techniques for object-oriented languages. He joined Google in mid-1999 and currently is a Google Senior Fellow in the Knowledge Group. His areas of interest include large–scale distributed systems, performance monitoring, compression techniques, information retrieval, application of machine learning to search and other related problems, microprocessor architecture, compiler optimizations, and development of new products that organize existing information in new and interesting ways. Products Jeff has developed for Google include AdSense, MapReduce, BigTable, and Google Translate.

Prior to joining Google, he was at DEC/Compaq's Western Research Laboratory, where he worked on profiling tools, microprocessor architecture, and information retrieval. Prior to graduate school, he worked at the World Health Organization's Global Programme on AIDS, developing software for statistical modeling and forecasting of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Gail Murphy

Gail Murphy received her PhD from UW CSE in 1996 where she worked with David Notkin. My research interests are in software engineering with a particular interest in improving the productivity of knowledge workers, including software developers. She is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Associate Dean (Research & Graduate Studies) in the Faculty of Science at the University of British Columbia. I am also a co-founder and Chief Scientist at Tasktop Technologies Incorporated.

Gail has accrued a long list of honors since her UW graduate student days. Recent ones include the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering award for “Most Influential Paper 10 Years Later,” the 2011 ACM SIGSOFT Retrospective Impact Paper Award, and a 2010 double header with the ACM Distinguished Scientist and ISCE Distinguished Paper awards. UW Engineering recognized her early career achievements with a 2008 Diamond Award.

2013

Anne Dinning

Anne Dinning received her Bachelors degree from UW CSE in 1984, where she did research with Professor Richard Ladner. After working in Seattle for a year, she moved to New York and received her PhD in computer science from the Courant Institute at NYU. She turned down a number of attractive faculty positions to become an early employee of D. E. Shaw, the hedge fund established by Columbia University computer science professor David Shaw. Today Anne is “first among equals” on the executive committee that oversees D. E. Shaw’s more than 1,000 employees, managing $26 billion in investment capital.

Edward Felten

Edward Felten, a Caltech physics undergraduate, worked for several years as an analyst with Caltech’s Concurrent Computing Project before earning his PhD from UW CSE in 1993, where he worked with Ed Lazowska and John Zahorjan. He then joined the computer science faculty at Princeton University, transitioned to computer security as a research area, and developed a strong interest in public policy related to information technology. In addition to being a professor in Princeton’s Department of Computer Science, he is a Professor in Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs, and the Director of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy; he recently spent two years in Washington DC on leave from Princeton as the first Chief Technologist of the Federal Trade Commission. Ed was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2011, and to the National Academy of Engineering in 2012.

2012

John K. Bennett

John K. Bennett (PhD '88) is an expert in the design, implementation, and evaluation of distributed systems. After teaching at Rice University, he joined the faculty at University of Colorado at Boulder in 2000, where he holds an endowed professorship in computer science and is a professor of electrical and computer engineering. He also served as associate dean of engineering and sciences, and now directs the ATLAS Institute, the Alliance for Technology, Learning, and Society - a campus-wide entrepreneurial catalyst and incubator for innovative interdisciplinary research, education, and creative work.

Wen-Hann Wang

Wen-Hann Wang's (PhD '89) educational and career odysseys have crossed four continents. Our man of the world is also our man at Intel, where he is vice president of Intel Labs in Hillsboro, Oregon, and director of circuits and systems research. A new area of responsibility is looking at how to apply circuit technologies to solve biologic challenges. During more than 20 years at Intel, Wang’s assignments have included two postings to Shanghai and dozens of trips abroad to Russia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Closer to home travels include spring and fall visits to Seattle as Intel’s liaison to the UW.

2011

Anne Condon

Anne Condon (PhD '87) is a computer science theoritician whose research has moved in a purposeful direction from complexity theory to DNA computing and algorithms for biology. After twelve years at the Computer Science faculty at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, she moved to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where she will become head of the Department of Computer Science in July. Besides research— currently focused on predicting secondary structures of nucleic acid polymers— Condon has a passion for mentoring emerging researchers, particularly undergraduate women. She is an ACM Fellow and the recipient of the 2010 A. Nico Habermann Award for service.

Jeremy Jaech

Jeremy Jaech (MS '80) has founded some of the best-known and most innovative software companies in the Pacific Northwest, including Aldus (pioneer in desktop publishing), Visio (technical drawing software now part of Microsoft Office), and Trumba (web-based event promotion). In 2008, Jeremy assumed the CEO role at Verdiem (power management software), where he successfully turned the company around financially. He is currently in residence on the fifth floor of the Paul G. Allen Center, exploring his next move.

2010

Greg Andrews

Greg Andrews (PhD '74) was one of the first PhD students in the program, working with Alan Shaw (now emeritus) on computer security and earning his degree in 1974. Over the course of a thirty-six-year career in academia, he has twice served as department chair at University of Arizona, authored three textbooks, and is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Rob Short

Rob Short's (MS '87) remarkable professional journey began in his native Ireland, where he earned a two-year electronics degree from the Cork Institute of Technology, a trade school. Starting his career at Digital Computer Corporation (DEC) in Galway, he was invited to the US to work on the pioneering VAX families of minicomputers, first in Massachusetts and later in Washington State. Working with Hank Levy, he earned his MS degree in 1987 and joined Microsoft in 1988 to work on Windows NT (progenitor of Windows XP and Windows 7). By 2000 he was a corporate vice president. Rob retired in 2007 to devote himself to non-profit work, helping found See Your Impact, a pioneering philanthropic organization.